Month: April 2010

The work submitted for examination is a CD of animations and an exegesis.

Four ‘Perfect bound’ copies of the exegesis (each with a CD of animations inserted) are contained within hand-bound boxes. The boxes are made of straw board secured with hot melt glue and bookbinding cloth.

The exegesis needs to be read alongside the animations. Iconography that relates to animations referred to in the text appears within the margins.

The CD is provided in a clear plastic insert inside the back cover. Although the insert was provided ‘as standard’ by the thesis binding company, I do not recommend it. The CD rolls out when you open the book!

I wrote and laid out the written thesis (exegesis) using the Lyx GUI interface of Latex, with Jabref for including citations and bibliography.

These are open source programmes that are freely available online. I would not recommend them unless you are interested in learning some code! It took me a long time to understand how to achieve the look and feel I wanted. Even then, there are things I would like to have done differently if I had time to learn how. For example, I prefer all text (including headings) aligned left, and for the text body to be ‘ragged right’.
I will persist Lyx, however, because I can see that it is possible to have more control … when I have learned more code!

For the major part of the project I used open source software on a Linux operating system.

Linux, Windows and Mac hardware and software were great for generating and combining animations. I used all three platforms to test the CD of animations. It is important to test all possible web browsers within each system because some are more or less forgiving of html code.

The animations are subject to a Creative Commons License. This means that re-use and re-mixing is invited on condition that acknowledgment is made that Lisa Roberts is the author of the original works and that the animations are not used for commercial gain. See: Creative Commons Share alike license.

The written thesis (pdf) is being prepared for publishing on-line, with hyperlinks to animations and artworks on the website, Antarctic Animation.

The Antarctic Animation website will continue to evolve to reflect changing perceptions of Antarctica as a focus of global climate change.